Not every photographer working in a studio environment has an army of assistants at their beck and call. Like Scott Forman for example. But what he lacks in manpower, he more than makes up for with his programming prowess. In an attempt to make the process of shooting lighting tests using himself as the subject a bit easier, Scott has developed a Windows-only application called ShutterVoice that allows him to control most of the functions in Canon’s EOS Utility software with simple spoken commands.
Without having to use a keyboard or even see the PC’s display, the ShutterVoice utility allows a photographer to adjust everything from shutter speed, to the aperture and even control focus and autofocus functions with simple commands. The software uses the Microsoft Speech SDK for all of the voice recognition, as well as the voice synthesizer for providing an audible confirmation of what you’ve asked it to do. So far the software has been tested with an EOS 50D and an EOS 20D by Scott, but additional beta testers have confirmed it also works with the EOS Rebel XSi and EOS 30D. But in theory it should work with any Canon SLR that’s compatible with the EOS Utility.
ShutterVoice is expected to be available sometime in December for a flat rate of $30 (there will be no standard vs. pro versions.)
People say that only losers need a virtual girlfriend. Bah! How many girlfriends have you had who dressed up in furry outfits and let you smack them on the ass with a giant paddle with a heart on it? Yeah, only four for me, too. But when none of them are around, you need something to keep you, um, entertained, and that’s what Alice the virtual anime girlfriend is for.
Technically, Alice is “augmented reality” as opposed to “virtual,” the distinction being that she interacts directly with physical objects (like you). She exists inside your computer, but interacts with objects with special patterns on them as you move them around in front of your webcam:
Just so you know, Alice’s birthday is February 14th, and we’ll assume she’s a consenting adult although it’s implied that she’s a high school student. She’s about 5’3″ and weighs 106 pounds, and likes teddy bears and dancing and singing. Oh, yeah, and she’s actually from 2025 but traveled to 2008 through a space-time distortion.
Alice can be all yours for about $100 from Amazon.co.jp.
How many times have you been at work browsing a popular torrent site when you find the latest (insert name of legally shared file) that you just had to get. But unfortunately downloading torrents at work is a no-no, and acronyms like VNC mean nothing to you. That’s why BitTorrent site Mininova has added a new personal bookmarks feature for logged-in users. Not only does it allow you to create a list of your favorite torrents wherever you happen to be, but it also provides them as an RSS feed. So if you’re using a BitTorrent client like uTorrent at home, you can actually subscribe to your personal Mininova bookmarks and every time you add a new torrent to the list it should automatically start downloading the next time uTorrent refreshes the feed.
Whatever your feelings about Windows Vista may be, you have to give credit to ‘Spec Works’ for putting together this truly impressive Vista iPhone theme. Of course since the iPhone doesn’t natively support themes or skins, you need to have a jailbroken phone with Summerboard and a few other apps to install it. (It even requires a few SSH steps.) At the moment the creator is working on an easy way to install the theme via Installer.app, but ModMyiFone.com has a pretty thorough tutorial on how to do it right now.
The theme includes over 90 Vista icons, custom boot and restore images, sliders, Vista login/logoff (lock/unlock) sound effects and has even recreated the sidebar application. You know it’s great that Apple has officially provided an SDK for the iPhone and is supporting third-party applications, but if you take a look at some of the truly impressive ‘unofficial’ software that’s available for the phone right now, they’ve got some stiff competition.
I swung by the Stanford Cool Product Expo yesterday to have a look at some of the… uh… cool products being showcased by companies from the Stanford University community (design groups, startups, etc.). I have a thing for nifty displaysystems, so BumpTop and their giant touchscreen caught my eye right off the bat. Take a look:
BumpTop is different from things like Surface for the simple reason that it’s software driven and requires no special hardware. You can use it with your mouse, or two mice to emulate a multitouch display. ‘Course, ideally you’d have a touchscreen to get the most out of the system, and by the time BumpTop launches later this year, hopefully we’ll have some affordable touchscreen computing platforms to choose from. I’m looking at you, Asus.
The prototype version (the one I saw appears to be a later beta version) showcases some neat little tricks that weren’t obvious in the above demo; you can see the prototype in action on YouTube after the jump. If you’re in any doubt how neat the little tricks actually are, you should know that the prototype demo video is ranked #10 in all time views in YouTube in the sci/tech category. So yeah, it’s cool. Read the rest of this entry »
This little web app does a fairly convincing job of turning one single 2D picture into a 3D scene that you can fly around with your keyboard. Since a single 2D picture doesn’t contain much in the way of depth information, researchers from Stanford University had to get creative to extract a depth map from an image:
“To convert the still images into 3-D visualizations, Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science, and Ashutosh Saxena, a doctoral student in computer science, developed a machine-learning algorithm that associates visual cues, such as color, texture, and size, with certain depth values based on what they have learned from studying two-dimensional photos paired with 3-D data. For example, says Ng, grass has a distinctive texture that makes it look very different close up than it does from far away. The algorithm learns that the progressive change in texture gives clues to the distance of a patch of grass.”
Sure, this is nowhere near as slick as Photosynth, but you can do it with any of your pictures without any additional information. It’s free; just register on the website and give it a try. You can upload any JPEG <5mb, and after some processing (it took about 5 minutes for me at 3am PST), you can fly around your image on the Make3D website. Since it's using purely visual cues, the algorithm is far from perfect, and it works best on landscapes. Best thing you can do is be patient and try a few different images... When it gets it right, it's very cool.
I usually try to leave the timewasters until later in the week when people have had a few days to get some actual work done, but this one’s just too fun to put off. Phun is basically a 2D physics playground program created by Umeå University student Emil Ernerfeld as their Computer Science thesis. While the goal of the software is to be educational and teach physics concepts like friction and restitution, it also encourages creativity and ends up being remarkably addictive. I could go on explaining why the software is worth checking out, but this YouTube video demonstrating what you can do with it is probably more convincing.
And the best part is that Phun is available as a free download as long as you don’t use it for commercial purposes. You can find the links to the Windows and Linux beta versions here, while a MacOS version is hopefully coming soon.
This interactive touch-based multiplayer game, called Firefly, is as far as I know the first example of a game designed specifically for Microsoft Surface. The premise is simple: use your fingers to corral colored fireflies into your jar, while squishing the flies on your opponent’s side. This is just the tip of the iceberg when if comes to the possibilities that Surface offers for gaming, but as a piece of platform-demoware, it kinda looks like fun.
Digital media is all over the place, in all kinds of different formats, and it’s often a huge pain in the ass to get it from one place to another, especially if the internet is involved. doubleTwist is an attempt to make all of your media play nice, especially with other people in social networking environments like Facebook. The idea is that the doubleTwist software will read all of your media, and make it available in one integrated, web-friendly place, doing all of the necessary reformatting and transcoding behind the scenes. You can then trade media back and forth with your friends just by dragging and dropping onto their online profiles.
As for DRM… doubleTwist was developed in part by the guy responsible for cracking DVD encoding as well as Apple’s FairPlay DRM. However, stripping DRM isn’t what this software is about. It will remove DRM from your iTunes music, sort of, but all it does it play the song in the background on mute while re-recording it to MP3, which you can do by yourself. And you have to have legally purchased and be authorized to play the iTunes music before it’ll do a thing. So, despite the root of doubleTwist, don’t expect it to perform any DRM miracles. Shame.
At this stage, doubleTwist supports relatively few (albeit the most common) file formats, and a limited number of devices. Also, the file sharing limits (when it comes to size and length) are quite restrictive. It’s a good idea and it’s completely free to download (it’s in beta at the moment), but if you’re serious about your media, you’ll probably want to keep messing with it the old fashioned way. For now, at least.
Related Tags: Photography, Software
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By Evan Ackerman
